fore I was born.

You may not credit the fact of the Swiss mountaineers pining of what is
called "Home-woe," when banished from their beloved glaciers, the same
as Cyrus's legions suffered from _nostalgia_; and, may put down the
Frenchman's _maladie du pays_, which some expatriated communists are
probably experiencing now in New Caledonia, to blatant sentimentality;
but they are each and all true expositions of feeling.

We Englishmen are generally prosaic; but some of us have known the
terrible yearning which this home-sickness produces in us in foreign
lands. The Devonshire shepherd will weep over the recollections which a
little daisy will bring back to him of the old country of his childhood,
when standing beneath an Australian gum tree. I have seen a Scotchman
in America cherish a thistle, as if it were the rarest of plants, from
its native associations; and I know of a potted shamrock which was
brought all the way across the ocean in an emigrant ship, by an Irish
miner, and which now adorns the window of a veranda-fronted cottage at
the Pittsburgh mines in Pennsylvania!

Some of us _are_ "sentimental," you see. I can answer for myself, at
least; and I know that the air of "Home, sweet Home," has affected me
quite as much as the "Ranz des Vaches" would appeal to the sensibilities
of an Alpine Jodeller!

I got home-sick now. The passion took complete possession of me.

The burning, suffocating heat of the summer "in the States," caused me
to pant after the cool shade of the old Prebend's walk at Saint Canon's;
and call to mind those inviting lawns and osiered eyots along the
Thames, where I used to spend the warm evenings at home. I thought as
Izaak Walton, the vicar's favourite, had thought before me--that I would
cheerfully sacrifice all hopes of worldly advancement, all dreams of
fortune, all future success, problematical though each and all
appeared--

So, I the fields and meadows green may view;
And daily by fresh rivers walk at will,
Among the daisies and violets blue,
Red hyacinth and yellow daffodil;
Purple narcissus, like the morning's rays,
Pale gander grass and azure culver keys.

In the gorgeous Indian summer, when the nature of the New World seems to
awake, dressing all the trees in fantastic foliage of varied hue, my
fancies were recalled to a well-remembered Virginian creeper that
ornamented the houses of the Terrace, where my darling lived; for its
leafy colouring in the au